Man pages and Cat error

I am having some errors with my linux system. I am running Ubuntu on a VPS server. I have not logged into it in quite some time but I logged in today and I can navigate around and see my files and everything, but man pages and cating anything don't seem to work. It just shows a blank screen with the (END) tab and no matter which direction keys I hit it dings at me. Only thing that does anything is to :q back to the command line.

Also, when I go for the abbreviated version (man -f ...) it says "[command]: Nothing Appropriate"

How are you logging in to your server? If you are using ssh or telnet maybe there is a language/locale/character set mismatch

I am using PUTTY (ssh client). And is there a reason to think that issue would be specific to the man pages? The info pages are working fine (at least for the few that I have tried) and I can navigate around just fine.

I believe something has happened to the cat program. I did "man -w cp" and found the location and the cp.1.gz file exists and is 16KB (although admittedly I'm not familiar with how to handle the file format) but when I cat it directly I get some nonsensical file that I need to manually kill on order to get the command line back. So not sure what else I can do to further diagnose this or fix it.

> The info pages are working fine (at least for the few that I have tried) and I can navigate around just fine.
info is the preferred format for manual pages. Some man pages I have are just stubs which say "go read the info page".
It could be your sysadmin has disabled the man pages (although not completely removed them).

> I believe something has happened to the cat program. I did "man -w cp" and found the location and the cp.1.gz file exists
.gz files are compressed.
Try using zcat instead, which will first uncompress the file, and then print it.